On 15 November, the Swiss Federal Council decided that the new federal law on the surveillance of post and telecommunications traffic (Bupf) will go into effect in March 2018, reported CEToday. Based on that, law enforcement authorities will have more tools to track digital criminals. Measures have also been adopted to determine the obligation to identiy users of public WLANs.

Users of WLANs, who provide access to these for their guests, such as restaurants, hotels or event organisers, will not need to take any measures. With professionally operated public WLAN access points, telecommunications service providers (ISPs) will have to ensure the identification of users. These WLAN providers often have systems with identification via SMS or tickets already in use. For the WLAN users themselves, nothing will change.

For data used for user identification, a deletion obligation has been introduced. This was done after a recommendation by the Legal Commission of the National Council. The collected data of WLAN providers must be destroyed after expiration of the retention period.

The rules are intended to relieve the ISPs. According to the federal government, the approximately 600 telecommunications providers who have to create a permanent surveillance service are expected to drop to a few dozen.